the art of eloquence
by Harlequin Sequins
Summary: Curiosity, you know. It kills us all. Shoshanna/Hellstrom.


**Author's Notes: **I was reading Markus Zusak today. His stream-of-thoughts and terse paragraphs style is very inspiring. Still recovering from surgery and I'm a little out of my mind so this is weird...it doesn't really go anywhere but downhill after the first paragraph, I think. And of course, after watching Inglourious Basterds for a healthy dose of Tarantino, my drug-twisted mind had to conjure up this out of this world pairing (has anyone ever written anything remotely Shoshanna/Hellstrom before? If they have, let me know...I kind of want to read some now.) and just _had _to write something about it.

There it is. I apologize for any outlandishness, but there it is. :P

_Disclaimer - Major Dieter Hellstrom and Shoshanna Dreyfus belong to Quentin Tarantino._

_

* * *

_

She is many things.

But nice is not one of them.

She could sit all night in that straight-backed chair, cigarette smoke curling indolently from the smoldering end, and think about all the things she's done. Try to justify their meaning. She could say they were actions born of self-preservation, but she would be lying. She did it for revenge. And that was the truth.

She used to be nice. But used to be was a far cry away from the _am now _that she has become. There are many words that describe her, and they flit past her cognizance even as she sits there, dragging a long smoke-littered breath from her cigarette, but there will never be just one. She has become a labyrinth.

And not even Ariadne could lead her out of this one.

* * *

It is all darkness when she finds him, lying there in the alleyway, his cold body gleaming like the flesh of the moon. His clothes are weather-torn, as if he had been ravaged by its ruthlessness, and for once he has experienced the cruelty that he has so deserved. She has the right mind to leave him there, rot in his own sputtering cough that sounds as if is uprooting his very lungs from his chest. But her eyes have narrowed; he is looking at her. Not a plea for mercy, but a shot of clarity in his pale eyes.

She wants to say something, but she usually doesn't. Lack of practice leaves her grappling for the right phrase before she gives up and watches, blankly, as he slips back into oblivion, one last bone-shattering cough rippling through the alleyway. Even the night shudders. She does too.

For a moment, she only stares. But as the sound of intrusive footsteps reaches her, she turns, points at the body before her.

In tilted, twisted morsels of Russian, she calls out to them. _ My husband is sick. Take him to my apartment, if you please._

_

* * *

_

When he wakes, she is sitting by the fire. Her figure is consumed by the throws of the shadows and she is rendered nothing more than an aftershade. A black thought. He cannot see her expression, she knows, but she can see his. It is nearly blank, but in life he had been cruel. The malice he wore like the rest of his angular features; something he could never take off without losing blood and flesh and bone.

He says nothing, even as she rises and appears at his bedside and her face emerges from the fire-spotted gloom. The feeling is there, when she presses the cool towel against the inferno that has become his skin, and he can almost hear the sounds of hell churning beneath his misleading surface. Perhaps he will die, he thinks of it often even as his brain chokes on web-spun doses of mucus, but it is not an altogether ugly thought.

Her mouth is a thin line. Resolve.

His lips slither, his teeth bare, and nothing but shaken breath escapes him. He is a cavern of secrecy, a collection of closet-skeletons he keeps buried in the empty space where a conscience should have been.

Even in his hall of mirrors sort of view, he knows he should not have happened. He enjoys the innate wickedness of his frame, the cruelty of his stature.

But he should have never been.

* * *

They never speak. Not once.

And there is no shame in that, she decides.

He is strong enough for the bull-headed stubbornness most men can never be rid of and the very sight of her is as if he has seen red. The broth he steals from her before she can set it on the slipshod end table, where she has abandoned her book and will likely not pick up until the sun begins to dip into the west. The fire cackles behind her, its laughter stealing over the gold-washed floorboards, and she does not seem to hear it until she looks over her shoulder, staring at the glowing embers.

When she turns again, a full-circle journey, their eyes slide into each other. His are cold and restless, even in their pallid canvas, and she can feel them shifting through her with inquisitive fingers of ice. Her own are blank. She has nothing to hide. Not anymore.

* * *

It is not until he is almost completely resurrected that she first examines what she is really doing. He has been saved from the precipice of a slow, winding descent into death. But saved for what she does not know.

Part of her asks if it is pity. Another coils in revulsion at such a thought and gives no sort of constructive reply. Most of her is simply breathless at the thought of sharing quarters with the black-leather demon she had encountered in her past. She cannot get past this part; it is what her cause is founded on and she cannot seem to escape its effect.

He is sitting on the windowsill, his spider-long legs bent and twisted into odd shapes. One beneath him, another presses against the splitnered shelf. A book lies sleeping in his lap, its patience with his attentions all but lost, and his eyes are locked on the grey-lined skyline. A bitter Russian wind taps on the ledge with weary knuckles; it ruffles his hair, almost patronizing, as it walks in and navigates the room with renewed vigor. He is apt to ignore it, simply staring, watching the horizon, as if something would come of it.

She is glad to escape his pale scrutiny. His measured malice.

If only for a moment. A moment she would never take for granted.

* * *

It is the first time in a long time that she feels him. No longer swathed in gloves, the unaltered power of his ability to evoke such sensation in her, of fear, of longing, is intensified by the naked brush of his skin against hers. His eyes have been on her, searching her every crevice, her every angle, for a point of entry. A code of access.

She is reading when he, at last, finds it in the corner of her eyes. When she steals a look in his direction and is caught red-handed with its intention in her grasp. He leans forward, a predator poised for the kill, but what he encountered was not the promise of a blood-filled victim at all. But an empty carcass – a predator of her own unique kind.

He kisses her and it is soft. A disarming gesture that she knows is not him, but a frontman. A smoke screen. His mouth dances to the rhythm of her heartbeat, counting each slow and calculated thrum of its slow cadence, and opens his mouth to breathe her in. Swallow her whole. She tastes the stagnancy of early morning cigarettes and late afternoon city musk on his tongue as it lines her slackened lips.

His reasoning does not surprise her. Though it never does.

_Curiosity, you know. It kills us all._

_

* * *

_

She still doesn't know how she has found herself in such a situation. He is the enemy and she keeps him that way, a figurine of certain death which sits on her windowsill, drinking in the draught of the world as if it were to be his last. It was pity. It was fear. It was that sinking feeling in the back of her fast closing throat that they would meet again, an inevitability, something she would have to face. She wanted it over with, her fate.

But now she is not so sure.

He is not affectionate. It is not in his nature to feel the way humanity does because, she knows, he is not much like human at all. Regardless of the man – the monster- who lurks the labyrinthine catacombs of his being, he is warm. He is skin and bone and blood which a heart pushes through his _very _human body. And regardless of strength, regardless of blueprints of reclusion she has drawn up in the past, she is lonely. And there is no escaping him.

His breath has taken on a life of its own. It permeates her, poisons her with it, and she is lost to him. Teeth nick the arch of her throat; a tongue laps away the blood. He is nothing if not cruel, but she is _feeling _something again and she wouldn't trade it for the world.

Her cheeks flood with scarlet in the place of the sigh she has buried deep within the grave of her resolve. With nothing more than a hitch of breath, he begins to move against her; their eyes in a deadlock, her hands palpitating in his hair, his lips like a pendulum against her red-stained neck.

It is a pulse of monotony which becomes them.

Like black leather gloves.

And books face down on the windowsill.

* * *

He says her name;

_Shoshanna._

And it is like confession.

She is his breathing cathedral, and into her he pours his sin, and he takes her apart brick by bone-mortered brick. Rebuilding her in his own twisted image of man.

The remnants of the day fall like glass from the open window. Sounds of the city pour in, filling the void that light has left behind. He breathes; she follows.

She is watching him. Let her watch, he thinks with a snap – _something breaks -, _and he reaches not for her, but the ice-thinned traces of the scotch which sits precariously on the corner. His arm brushes against her bare chest.

He smiles as her eyes fold in on themselves; glassy and doll-like.

* * *

It's a Sunday afternoon when she first says it. Justifies his being with the sound of him falling from her lips like dewdrops of loosened soul. Beads of it, they trickle down the downcast sides of her mouth, but she is not shaken.

Only deeper in her resolve.

_Dieter._

He looks over, a force of habit.

And finds she is as black and hollow as the day he saw her flush against the fire-stained backdrop of the hearth.

* * *

He hasn't left the apartment since she stole him from the little piece of makeshift hell she'd found him in. He isn't one for cordiality, never has been, never will, and so it is something alien that crawls inside of him when he demands her company.

_Where will we go?_

His posture softens; his insides harden to stone.

_A walk._

Her arm fits perfectly in the crook of his. And he hates it. Hates her. And hates that she is entirely his – belongs to him – and does not seem to care.

* * *

Her eyes are almost shy, but he knows better.

"I'm pregnant." A French lilt threatens to encompass her poorly-sewn Russian disguise.

He licks the vestiges of cream from his spoon. "It's mine then, is it?"

This simply would not do.

No, not at all.

* * *

She is not surprised when she wakes to find an empty bedside. It has cooled, but the sheets have not lost the footprint of his body; he has not been gone long.

It is relief that fills her first. Then guilt. An array of sentiment spills over and leaks over the bedsheets, but she is not sure what color stains them, what shade her emotions boast in the early morning light. She clutches the sheet to her bare chest, staring at the ghost his presence left behind.

And she sighs.

She is made of many things.

But _he_ is not one of them.


End file.
